Are Your Drugs Reversing Your Type 2 Diabetes?

Diabetics who are prescribed metformin (Glucophage, Riomet, Glucophage XR), usually want to know what the drug is going to do for their body. What makes metformin the No.1 drug that health care providers prescribe for type 2 diabetes?

Metformin has three primary actions in your body:

Action No. 1: It decreases the absorption of carbohydrates in your intestines. This is probably why so many people who take metformin report that they have symptoms such as nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. Your body was created to absorb carbohydrates. Anything that interferes with that process has the potential to cause symptoms.

This was shown to be true several years ago when people started to eat a new type of potato chip. This potato chip was called Olestra and was touted as being the newest and the best... the food industry said you could eat it to your heart's content and your body would not absorb any fat from it.

Well, Olestra never became that popular because it caused gastrointestinal symptoms... nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. It interfered with the body's ability to absorb nutrients.

Action No. 2: Metformin reduces your liver's normal production of glucose, which is about a gram or two a day in most people. This extra glucose is a reserve for times when your body is under stress. Have you ever heard of the "fight or flight response"? This happens when you are under a lot of stress... in what your body perceives as being a life or death situation. It gives your body the ability to either fight with more strength than you've ever had before, or to run the fastest you have ever run to get right away from the problem. To be successful, your body needs that extra reserve of glucose.

Action No. 3: Metformin increases insulin sensitivity, decreasing insulin resistance... now that is good.

But the problem is still the same old problem you had in the beginning; metformin may help control type 2 diabetes but it does nothing to reverse it.

There is often a health problem of some kind in our life that we need to solve. Some are small problems... some are big. A small problem would be maybe falling off your bicycle when you were young and you cut your leg. A bigger problem would be when you were a young adult and had acne breaking out on your face and body.

Now where would you be if that cut never healed? Where would you be if you still had pimples on your face, if they didn't heal? You solved these problems... these health problems were healed. So where will you be if you don't heal your diabetes, if you don't find out how to reverse type 2 diabetes? The answer is out there.